TIME Mid-August, day into the following morning LOCATION Bor-Thoodell village, on the northern edge of Borthanza
BACKGROUND:
Something had been watching them move through the jungle for the better part of a day before it finally showed itself – the elves whose territory bordered the ruins of Borthanza, and whose patience with trespassers was, by all accounts, thin.
What came after the elves let them pass was worse: Bor-Thoodell, the last village before the mountain, and a debt of hospitality that had to be paid in blood before it would let them go.
WHAT HAPPENED
Rain caught them in the open as the trees finally thinned – heavy, vision-blurring drops that turned the last stretch of jungle into a slog right up until the village itself came into view.
What should have been a working evening looked wrong the moment they saw it: a field of chest-high razor grass leading up to a hill of round, palm-thatched huts, and not a soul or a cooking fire in sight. Raven placed the shape of it a moment later – the same doughnut-like scorch pattern they’d already crossed once, days back, ringing the mound the village sat on.
Beloq found the narrower game trails threading through the grass rather than risk cutting a path by hand – wicked stuff, sharp enough to open skin through cloth if anyone strayed off it – and led the way in, wary now rather than merely tired.
And, underfoot, old traps nobody had bothered to disarm. Krusha caught one anyway, a springing bamboo blade that missed him by inches, and a second, subtler trap a few steps later that folded his ankle sideways into a rock-lined pit before he could stop himself.
He healed it off with a word to KemerLexi and swapped places in the line with Raven rather than risk a third.
At the treeline where the grass gave way to the mound, Raven found a severed finger, ant-eaten and several days old.
An arrow answered the discovery a moment later, loosed from a darkened doorway on the mound above and glancing off Krusha before the Agents could even place the shooter.
Beloq went ahead to parley and came back having found nobody home – just an empty yurt, a stove still warm, and a crate that turned out to be hiding an eighteen-inch tunnel mouth beneath it.
A bamboo spear jabbed out of the dark the moment Raven leaned over the hole, missing narrowly; a shouted apology followed it up from below – the halflings living beneath the village had mistaken the Agents for orc raiders in the doorway light.
The halfling elders had a warning ready once the mistake was sorted out: night demons, they called them – the same things that had come down out of the sky before and dragged off their dead and wounded.
Beloq translated the fuller account properly, elder to elder: a crash from above, then many, as burning eggs fell from the sky.
What came out of them didn’t attack outright – pale, thin, clicking things that swung their heads back and forth, with strange eyes, a vertical slit that shone red in the firelight, seemingly unsure at first what to make of the food they were offered.
’They looked hungry. They didn’t take it at first – sniffed and touched it, didn’t seem to know what to do with it. Some tasted it, and they started howling, eyes wide, unblinking. Then the others started eating. Madness followed – swarming the village like fire ants, tearing and ripping like wild beasts, howling and clicking the whole time. We fought well, but there were too many. They lifted their dead and wounded and carried them back up.’
Halfling elders, translated by Beloq
They weren’t wrong about what was coming.
A wail of pain from outside rose in pitch and was joined by others, and the Agents scrambled down into the tunnels as the sound closed in.
Krusha got wedged squeezing through and had to fight his own way free while Beloq wrestled a crate back over the opening above him.
One by one, pale, spindly, clicking things dropped down the shaft after them anyway – grimlocks, hunting by scent and sound in the dark – and one by one, Raven’s blades and Ash’s bolts cut each of them down before it could do more than howl.
The rest of the pack gave up the tunnel mouth and retreated, their howls fading back into the jungle.
The village chief, impressed rather than alarmed, invited the Agents to stay the night – dry clothes exchanged for their own, a cramped, smoky evening among the twenty or so villagers left, and no further trouble before morning.
Morning brought a gift Krusha didn’t entirely appreciate – a flower chain from one of the village children that turned out to smell, and taste, considerably worse than it looked – and then an “honour” the chief clearly expected to be accepted: the killing of a lizardman held in a bamboo cage downstream of the waterfall, meant for the feast that evening.
Raven refused outright.
Krusha, weighing it as closer to his faith’s harder edges than to cruelty, didn’t, and put the bamboo spear through the creature’s skull himself rather than let the moment turn into an insult nobody could walk back.